Guest Dave.B Posted February 18, 2007 Report Share Posted February 18, 2007 Hello all, this is my first post here - please go easy! I'm a bit of a noob. I'm just trying out a Mandriva One 2007 live CD on my laptop, and I'm very impressed indeed. I really want to go ahead and install it as a start to ridding my network of Windows completely. However, there is a showstopper: my Belkin 54g Wireless USB dongle doesn't seem to work. It is recognised in the hardware list, and at the top of the Wireless network set-up dialog box, but this box doesn't show any available networks. The activity light on the dongle is NOT lighting up at all. I can connect fine via ethernet. If I boot back into Windows it works fine and shows two wi-fi networks (one being mine). As said, I'm a bit of a noob, so forgive me if this is dumb, but I have searched already. This problem appears a bit different to anything I've read on here though. Thanks in advance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbuckley2004 Posted February 18, 2007 Report Share Posted February 18, 2007 (edited) You may want to try here http://nextgen.no-ip.org/~andrew/linux/ndi...nfo10-32bit.php There are several issues going on at once, not the least of which is that your Belkin wireless (probably) uses a Broadcom chip. Broadcom's support for Linux (of any flavor) has been - well - disappointing. There are *no* Linux drivers for the Broadcom chip sets provided by the manufacturers (someone will correct me if I'm wrong about the number!), but I understand that people have successfully used ndiswrapper to make a workable Linux driver. Usually people can use ndiswrapper with the windows driver that comes with their hardware. But in the case of Broadcom chip sets someone usually has to make a specific use driver, or perhaps a set of drivers. The one that works for you may depend upon your laptop and/or the Linux kernel you're using. It's not exactly easy. It's do-able, but may take some self-education and patience. The easiest solution is to give up on Belkin and invest in another brand, one with better support. The better solution (probably) is to read-up and see how others have gotten it to work. Think of it like getting under the hood of your "409" in 1966 and "suping it up". There are lots of people able and willing to help when you have specific questions. Edited February 18, 2007 by jbuckley2004 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dave.B Posted February 18, 2007 Report Share Posted February 18, 2007 Jbuckley, Thank you for your reply. Between bouts of frustration this afternoon I've done some searching and found this: http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/belkin/index.html which covers the exact model of USB stick I have (I have the Ralink RT73 chipset). Having read that page I'm about 50% confident that I can set it up. Hopefully that will increase with some self-education and patience, but I've run out of the latter for today! My only experience with Linux up to this point is re-flashing a Linksys NSLU2 with uNSLUng firmware and running mt-daapd (iTunes-esque music server) on it, so I'm not too bad at using the command line. However, I obviously can't set it up while running off a live CD, so I'll stick with Ethernet for now, as ultimately it's Mrs. Dave.B who will need to be comfortable using it. I'll wait a week or so and see if she gets used to it. I'll install properly then... Again, thank you for your reply, I appreciate the help. Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dave.B Posted March 11, 2007 Report Share Posted March 11, 2007 OK, nearly a month on... I've installed the OS from a Mandriva 2007 DVD and I'm pretty happy with it, but I still can't get my wireless USB stick to work. I tried the native Linux drivers I linked to in my 2nd post, but they wouldn't compile for some reason, so I chose the ndiswrapper method instead. That seemed to go pretty well, and now if I type ndiswrapper -l I get: [root@localhost dave]# ndiswrapper -l Installed drivers: rt73 driver installed, hardware present [root@localhost dave]# and if I remove the USB stick, the "hardware present" does not appear, so I reckon that is all working fine. But now if I got to KWifimanager and enter my essid and encryption details etc... then click "Activate" the laptop just hangs. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I can't be far off... Cheers Dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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